When it comes to everyday routine, there is a lot that is monotonous. We get up, eat breakfast, brush our teeth, commute to work, toil away with a degree of diligence, make a dozen phone calls, fight rush hour traffic on our way back, stop at the grocery store, cook dinner, talk to our kids or cats, and doze off to the sound of CNN, CSI, or (whenever there are no witnesses) The Bachelor. The next day, we do it again. Ditto with the day after. Much of life is not that glamorous. But then there are The Juicy Bits: what I'm calling the trinity of love, lust, and the luster of life. These are what I'll primarily be talking about in this blog, for - let's be honest - they are what we usually want to talk about. And we also like to talk about how these things drive us crazy. We get a special buzz from gossiping about the failures of love, the foolishness of lust, and the elusiveness of life's luster - about all the ways in which we are robbed of what (we imagine) would make our lives worth living.
Whenever there is love and lust, the luster of life tends to follow. Those with a lot of love and desire in their lives usually find it easy to access that spine-tingling thrill that makes us feel like our lives have meaning. Indeed, one reason many of us pursue romantic relationships is that there is virtually nothing as effective as new love in making us feel fully alive and self-connected. Falling in love adds zing to the rest of our lives so that even our most tedious tasks become easier to bear. What usually bothers us suddenly doesn't. What seemed like a mountain becomes a mole-hill. The self-doubts that nibble at the edges of our consciousness miraculously recede. And even the guy who snatches the last strawberry danish at our coffee shop can't get under our skin. Our shrunken spirit swells to the size of a giant so that life's little annoyances lose their poignancy. Whoever said that man can't fly didn't know what he or she was talking about!
One of the hardest things about breakups is that we lose the patina that coats life with a special glow. This is one reason it's important to recognize that even though love and lust may be among the most direct routes to the luster of life, they are not the only ones, and certainly not the most reliable. I think of the luster of life as consisting of all those things that make us feel that there is more to life than what readily meets the eye - that there is meaning "beyond" the daily grind. But this shouldn't be confused with the idea that only those experiences that yank us out of our everyday routines - as love and lust tend to do, even if temporarily - are capable of igniting the spark that makes life feel eminently worth living. The everyday, in other words, is not necessarily the same thing as the daily grind, even if we have the tendency to let the two coincide.
One of the challenges of human life - if you'll let me get all existential on you - is to keep the everyday from sliding into the daily grind. Romance is one way to do so, and I'll be talking a lot about the details of this in the months to come. But you don't need to have a relationship to accomplish this task. As a matter of fact, it is often solitary people, as well as those recovering from the bitter disappointments of love and lust, who find the most creative and soul-refining solutions to the dilemma. Perhaps this is because when the obvious solutions - love and lust - are missing, people are forced to become uncommonly resourceful; when you can't trust love and desire to carry you to a transcendent place, you are likely to invent other ways of attaining this goal.
Humans will never be entirely satisfied by the daily grind. They will always yearn for something more noble, more enigmatic, and more inspiring. They will never stop looking for the luster of life even if they sometimes stop looking for love and lust. And this is a good thing: it's what marks humans as creatures who are designed to scan the horizon for answers to life's basic questions; it ensures that the quest for the Holy Grail continues even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In a way, it is our very restlessness about life's general lack of luster that guarantees that we'll never entirely run out of moments when that luster, however fleetingly, finds its way into the rhythm of everyday life.
